My friend Jim Roseberry (studiocat.com) built and tested a computer using the AMD Rysen, and had this to share about the results:
QUOTE: Jim Roseberry "Going to assemble/test an AMD Ryzen 1800x based DAW today. AMD has made big performance claims for this new CPU. If audio stress-tests live up to the hype, it'll offer performance equal to the Intel 6900k ($1k) at half the cost. From a performance perspective, the past decade has been ruled by Intel. It would be nice to see serious competition from AMD. Intel socket 2011-3 (X99 motherboards) have the advantage of quad-channel RAM... and currently offer more advanced options (U.2, Thunderbolt-3, 128GB RAM, etc). I'm skeptical... but anxious to see the results."
THE RESULTS
QUOTE: "OK folks, the old adage, "If it's too good to be true..." is certainly applicable. The Ryzen 1800x is particularly good at heavy multi-threaded applications (video rendering). What it's not good at is heavy multi-threaded applications at ultra low latency audio settings. Loaded a heavy audio project as a stress-test. Listening to the entire mix... all seemed to be going well (playing at a 48-sample ASIO buffer size - RME UFX). Solo'd the kick drum... and found that there was some subtle garbling of audio. Removed a bunch of processing... and the garbled audio was still happening. For what we do, this rules out the Ryzen CPUs.
Another thing to keep in mind, the X1800 is "bleeding edge" (first gen motherboards with few BIOS revisions)... and applications not compiled/optimized with the Ryzen architecture in mind. At one point (running the latest beta BIOS), I changed settings in the BIOS... and SMT (Hyper-threading in AMD speak) stopped functioning all together (even though it was set to Enabled). Had to flash to the last release version to resolve the issue. In Sonar Platinum, things like Ctrl+ dragging PhoenixVerb (copying the plugin to another track) caused Sonar to crash. There were also lots of "general error" messages that popped up during use. These types of issues aren't AMD's fault, but working around them makes hour-to-hour use of the application somewhat of a pain.
Running an Intel 6850k, none of these issues were present. Back to the audio stress-test, when running the Intel 6850k, audio was completely glitch-free when solo'ing the kick drum. For video rendering (as other benchmarks have shown), the 1800x handily bests the 6850k. Both the 1800x and 6850k are $500 CPUs (thus the comparison). Another thing to keep in mind is that well-spec'd Intel X99 motherboards offer Thunderbolt-3, U.2, and other high-end options currently not available on X370 boards. Intel owns Thunderbolt... and I don't think they're going to be in any hurry to license it to AMD. I have no doubt that video editors will love Ryzen. Hard-core audio folks will want to stick with Intel."
QUOTE: Jim Roseberry "Going to assemble/test an AMD Ryzen 1800x based DAW today. AMD has made big performance claims for this new CPU. If audio stress-tests live up to the hype, it'll offer performance equal to the Intel 6900k ($1k) at half the cost. From a performance perspective, the past decade has been ruled by Intel. It would be nice to see serious competition from AMD. Intel socket 2011-3 (X99 motherboards) have the advantage of quad-channel RAM... and currently offer more advanced options (U.2, Thunderbolt-3, 128GB RAM, etc). I'm skeptical... but anxious to see the results."
THE RESULTS
QUOTE: "OK folks, the old adage, "If it's too good to be true..." is certainly applicable. The Ryzen 1800x is particularly good at heavy multi-threaded applications (video rendering). What it's not good at is heavy multi-threaded applications at ultra low latency audio settings. Loaded a heavy audio project as a stress-test. Listening to the entire mix... all seemed to be going well (playing at a 48-sample ASIO buffer size - RME UFX). Solo'd the kick drum... and found that there was some subtle garbling of audio. Removed a bunch of processing... and the garbled audio was still happening. For what we do, this rules out the Ryzen CPUs.
Another thing to keep in mind, the X1800 is "bleeding edge" (first gen motherboards with few BIOS revisions)... and applications not compiled/optimized with the Ryzen architecture in mind. At one point (running the latest beta BIOS), I changed settings in the BIOS... and SMT (Hyper-threading in AMD speak) stopped functioning all together (even though it was set to Enabled). Had to flash to the last release version to resolve the issue. In Sonar Platinum, things like Ctrl+ dragging PhoenixVerb (copying the plugin to another track) caused Sonar to crash. There were also lots of "general error" messages that popped up during use. These types of issues aren't AMD's fault, but working around them makes hour-to-hour use of the application somewhat of a pain.
Running an Intel 6850k, none of these issues were present. Back to the audio stress-test, when running the Intel 6850k, audio was completely glitch-free when solo'ing the kick drum. For video rendering (as other benchmarks have shown), the 1800x handily bests the 6850k. Both the 1800x and 6850k are $500 CPUs (thus the comparison). Another thing to keep in mind is that well-spec'd Intel X99 motherboards offer Thunderbolt-3, U.2, and other high-end options currently not available on X370 boards. Intel owns Thunderbolt... and I don't think they're going to be in any hurry to license it to AMD. I have no doubt that video editors will love Ryzen. Hard-core audio folks will want to stick with Intel."
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